Weird OS X Problem Desktop icons disappeared

[Ollie Cromwell]

Anyone come across a problem where all the desktop icons disappear? I also cannot right click on my desktop to bring up a contextual menu, my machine appears to be running faultlessly apart from that. I have run Onyx to reset permissions and have checked the disk but cannot seem to find anything wrong.

Help!!!


Running OSX 10.10 on a quad core 2.66 Mac Pro.

[wrldwzrd89]

One thing that could cause this to happen is accidentally renaming the Desktop folder in your user folder to something other than "Desktop".

[swiftaw]

Try restarting Finder

[pianoman]

Try restarting Finder

or the computer.

[atszyman]

Have you by chance been connected to an external monitor recently?

Had a co-worker "lose" a folder on his desktop this weekend due to it simply being off-screen. View->Arrange By->whatever brought the folder back to the screen.

[Ollie Cromwell]

I have tried all the basic stuff like resetting permissions reasing all preference files and restarting the machine.

It seems weird the desktop is locked off, I cant right click on the desktop, (I can on an application window and even on the dock, just not on the desktop itself?)

[Ollie Cromwell]

Have you by chance been connected to an external monitor recently?

Had a co-worker "lose" a folder on his desktop this weekend due to it simply being off-screen. View->Arrange By->whatever brought the folder back to the screen.

My Mac pro is connected to 2 external monitors, neither of them is the issue, it is not just a single folder that has disappeared, all my drive icons, folders and files have disappeared, I have a blank inaccessible desktop...

I cant go to view and sort my icons by the way as I cannot right click on my desktop. Part of the problem that I mentioned......

[atszyman]

My Mac pro is connected to 2 external monitors, neither of them is the issue, it is not just a single folder that has disappeared, all my drive icons, folders and files have disappeared, I have a blank inaccessible desktop...

I cant go to view and sort my icons by the way as I cannot right click on my desktop. Part of the problem that I mentioned......

Sorry about that, I think of laptops most of the time... what it should have read was additional monitors rather than external.

You don't have to right click to be able to do View->whatever, the View menu is in the menu bar and accessible by left clicks as well.

I realized it was a long-shot but thought I'd offer the idea just in case it was a similar problem to one I'd seen recently.

[Ollie Cromwell]

Sorry about that, I think of laptops most of the time... what it should have read was additional monitors rather than external.

You don't have to right click to be able to do View->whatever, the View menu is in the menu bar and accessible by left clicks as well.

I realized it was a long-shot but thought I'd offer the idea just in case it was a similar problem to one I'd seen recently.

What is weird is that the whole View menu is greyed out and inacessible, other menus are working but not that one? Hmmmm..

[Kilamite]

What happens when you take a screenshot? (CMD+SHIFT+4)

OSX should save the screenshot to your desktop (unless you have changed that with a 3rd party hack).

[soLoredd]

I've had this problem...very rarely...but sometimes my external HD icons will disappear but if I go into Finder I can see them. This is on a MacBook, if it makes any matter.

[Ollie Cromwell]

What happens when you take a screenshot? (CMD+SHIFT+4)

OSX should save the screenshot to your desktop (unless you have changed that with a 3rd party hack).

I can take a screenshot, if I open a finder window and navigate to my desktop folder it is there (along with everything else that should be on my desktop)

This is really causing me a lot of head scratching!

[atszyman]

I can take a screenshot, if I open a finder window and navigate to my desktop folder it is there (along with everything else that should be on my desktop)

This is really causing me a lot of head scratching!

Here's a MacFixIt Forum's Thread (http://www.macfixitforums.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=tiger&Number=792743&Forum=&Words=VueScan&Match=Or&Searchpage=0&Limit=25&Old=allposts&Main=792713&Search=true) with some suggestions for a problem that sounds identical to yours.

Another question: Do you have any 3rd party Finder modification/navigation tools installed?

[MissEss]

I had some app icons disappear .. and then my entire profile vanished. Not sure if this is the same thing you are experiencing, but a heads up that if you haven't backed up in a while, do it now.

[polycat33]

My hard drive icon disappeared when I took a screenshot (like the screenshot file was written to the desktop in the place where the hard drive should have been, and hard drive was gone). Restarting finder did the trick!

[skyshock21]

Here's how you fix this. Close all open apps except for Finder. You can Command+tab to cycle through them. Use Command+q to quit each one. Once you are sitting at your desktop with Finder having focus on the top menu bar, go to View > Clean up. Voila, they should return. Apple REALLY needs to fix this problem. Any time you move your icons around on the external monitor, they seem to "stick" to that monitor and when you unplug your laptop from the external monitor, they don't automatically move back to where they were previously located on the laptop screen. It's been a problem ever since OSX came out. Apple knows about it, but apparently don't care enough to fix.

Welcome to Apple - think different. YAY! :rolleyes:

[phenotypical]

I had this problem too - running 10.5.7

Clears up by logging out and back in.

But this solution from Apple support seems to have fixed it: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1916

"Make sure the computer name in Sharing preferences is not blank. Also, make sure the computer name only includes ASCII characters from following set:
0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"

[phenotypical]

Eh, thought that fixed it. Went over a week without seeing it, but it happened again this morning. Weird. Logging out and back in always fixes it - but would be nice to see resolved.

[bradc6]

MacBook Pro 2.33, ghz 3 gb ram
connects to an Xserve
system 10.5.7

run Entourage, Mail, Photshop, QXpress, Irritator, typical design crud. Methinks it is an OS issue.

[mab75]

This just happened to me after a restart. Weird. I just upgraded iphoto, but i doubt that has something to do with it. M$ entourage is doing som kind of update as well, i put the blame that way.

[bordenkecher]

I had this problem twice now. The first time I restarted and everything appeared again as it should but re-aligned to the right, not in my customized pattern.

They disappeared again, this time I relaunched Finder and everything came back as they should in their customized places.

I went back and renamed my computer in the shared section underneath system preferences. I had a "." in my name, so I am hoping this doesn't happen again after the renaming. If it does I'll let you all know.

I'm currently running 10.5.7 on a MBP

[muffinman]

Yeah, restart and shutdown. My computer acts funny if I don't shut it down once in a while

[Joseph Meltzer]

Try going into

/Users/username/Library/Preferences/

open up

com.apple.Finder.plist in textedit.

look for the "CreateDesktop" entry and change "false" to "true".

Hope this worked

[pdigz]

Had this problem----desktop unresponsive, no context menus, icons disappeared, etc ----to be completely honest this happened hours after installing Snow Leopard on my Macbook Pro AND , I'm sure not coincidentally, uninstalling Path Finder. I tried everything on this and other forums and nothing worked.
Tried editing Finder Plists, nothing worked, but...
This did:

1. Go to user/library/preferences/ and
2. Remove (move/delete/whatever--I originally just moved them but they are not needed so ended up deleting) these two files:
com.apple.finder.plist
and
com.apple.FolderActions.plist

3. Force quit to relaunch Finder.

Everything back to normal (in my case).

Good luck, hope it works for you, this was driving me crazy.

[nhawk]

Start Terminal from Spotlight (Apple+Space). In Terminal type "killall Finder." This will restart all instances of Finder. The icons came back on the desktop for me.

[Cam101]

Start Terminal from Spotlight (Apple+Space). In Terminal type "killall Finder." This will restart all instances of Finder. The icons came back on the desktop for me.

Worked for me... thanks!

[Debocoffin]

This has happened to me a few times recently. I searched for the simplest answer but kept finding complicated fixes. Then I found someone who wanted to know HOW to make the desktop icons disappear, to clear the desktop and remove all the distracting icons. For that, all you have to do is press control Q while in the finder window. Then I realized it's possible that I thought I was quitting something else (like Mail) and missed, inadvertently "quitting" the finder. If that's a possiblity, just click the finder icon on the dock and see if your icons reappear. I'm still not sure if that's what I've done to occasionally "lose" my desktop icons, but I wouldn't be surprised.

[mcclanelivefree]

I'm having the same problem, using Snow Leopard. Unfortunately, I can't even access Terminal from Spotlight (I write Terminal in Spotlight search box, but it doesn't show me anything).

I'm only able to use the applications I linked on the dock, while the other ones on Finder are inaccessible.

How can I login using test account? I searched here and there on the Net but I didn't find any info about that.

Thanks in advance.

[soularise]

Start Terminal from Spotlight (Apple+Space). In Terminal type "killall Finder." This will restart all instances of Finder. The icons came back on the desktop for me.

I tried everything when this happened with my macbook pro. The solution above was the only thing that worked. I do use an external monitor so that probably screws it up, but it's really annoying nonetheless.

[ptbalfour]

1. Go to user/library/preferences/ and
2. Remove (move/delete/whatever--I originally just moved them but they are not needed so ended up deleting) these two files:
com.apple.finder.plist
and
com.apple.FolderActions.plist

3. Force quit to relaunch Finder.

This worked for me. Yup it was driving me crazy.
Thanks

[Denarius]

I'm having the same problem, using Snow Leopard. Unfortunately, I can't even access Terminal from Spotlight (I write Terminal in Spotlight search box, but it doesn't show me anything).

I'm only able to use the applications I linked on the dock, while the other ones on Finder are inaccessible.

How can I login using test account? I searched here and there on the Net but I didn't find any info about that.

Thanks in advance.
If you can't get do anything then your best bet is to do what's been recommended in single user mode

1.Restart holding down command+s
2.At the prompt, type the two following commands.

rm /Users/username/Library/Preferences/com.apple.FolderActions.plist
rm /Users/username/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist

[geminixx]

My desktop (PB17 tiger) disappeared completely, but the dock and my desktop picture were still visible. Murphy's Law - I had just finished many hours of work and had not backed up yet.

Rebuilding permissions, repairing from Apple CD, rebuilding with Drive Genius, removing finder prefs and reinstalling system update all failed to correct the issue. NAV found no virus or trojan.

Booting from my external, I was able to see that over a ten hour period, 16,736 files had been downloaded to my desktop folder. All files had the suffix of either "xul.part" or "html.part"

Theorizing this may have choked the finder, a new folder was created inside the desktop folder, all ".part" files were then moved to the empty folder. This took several minutes to complete. Once the tally of files was trimmed, the desktop once again appeared.

Firefox, Netscape (yes, I know - I just LIKE it okay?) and iTunes were running at the time of the invasive downloads. I cannot guarantee one of our cats did not walk over the keyboard and trigger some unknown command so the reason being remains unknown.

I am uncertain if there is a size limit on desktop content (mine had 33Gb), there certainly appears to be an item (file or folder) quantity limit.

Thank goodness for firewire boot drives! Get one if you haven't already (at least as large as your internal drive so you can also do full backups (my iTunes library represents years of work with sorting, tags, artwork and lyrics for app 90% of 29,000 tunes)

[goodtown]

Ollie,

1. Open your system preferences
2. Go into "Displays"
3. Change the resolution on your monitor (to any other res)
4. Now change it back

You're done.
:apple:

[funn1bunn1]

Thanks. My desktop icons were gone too, then I realize it's because I quit finder...

[Joseph Meltzer]

When I got this problem, it was because I installed 'Path Finder' and turned on 'Show Path Finder Desktop' and then used the option 'Hide Finder Desktop'. This caused my Finder desktop icons to disappear and the Path Finder ones came up, which was all good until I disabled everything except 'Hide Finder Desktop'. I thought everything was normal and so I deleted Path Finder without seeing the icons had gone.

Install Path Finder again and disable the option. If this doesn't fix it, delete your Finder preferences file in ~/Library/Preferences

[danieljoe]

Hi guys, i dont know if this has been said but I have recently had the same problem... Turns out it was an issue with a program i got from a MacUpdate bundle a while back called Hyperspaces... I logged out and logged back in and everything was there, but then as soon as Hyperspaces autoloaded, they all disappeared again... All I did was quit the application and they suddenly all appeared again.

I re-opened Hyperspaces and checked in the preferences... In the General tab, there is a "Show Desktop Icons" tickbox...

Seems a bit daft but it took me ages to work out thats what the problem was!!!